James Ijames wrote his first play at 13, “because my grandmother made me,” Ijames recalls. “She said, this is how they work, the name goes here, then what they say goes next, and if they do something, you write that in between. And then she took it and they did it at church.” Theater didn’t stick right away; he focused on band and choir in high school, and attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he pursued a degree in music with a concentration in choral music conducting. However, the program wasn’t for him. “I got to Morehouse and really quickly discovered that I hated it.” His vocal teacher suggested he audition for Once on This Island; he was cast, and redirected his career towards theater. At Moorehouse, he was introduced to Suzan–Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and Mac Wellman’s Description Beggared; or the Allegory of Whiteness, two plays that play with history and stretch the rules of realism plays, plays that excited him about theatre.
On the advice of his acting teacher, he ventured into acting next, undertaking an acting MFA at Temple University in Philadelphia. He honed his talents as a performer, began working with professional playwrights, and solidified his actor-based approach to writing. In 2011 and 2012, Ijames performed in both Superior Donuts and Angels in America, taking home Theatre Philadelphia’s Barrymore Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Play for each. In 2014, he co-founded Orbiter 3 along with four other playwrights and Artistic Director Maura Krause. Orbiter 3 was a critically acclaimed producing playwrights’ collective that later premiered Ijames’s Moon Man Walk in 2015.
“My love of telling stories and acting stories really comes from being around people in barbershops and at church who were theatrical in their manner and theatrical in their perspective on life,” said Ijames. “That's the biggest way that it shows up in my work.” Ijames writes with the kind of endless curiosity that actors want to have when performing. His work examines real world issues of identity, race, and society in familiar backdrops with surreal twists and sharp humor. One of his early works, The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington (2012) follows an ailing Martha Washington as she is tended to by the enslaved people who will gain their freedom upon her death. Set in the midst of a fever-dream of sorts, we watch as Miz Martha, the audience, and America reckon with the enduring fallout of the slavery that built the country. Similarly, Ijames’s more recent work, Good Bones (2023), was commissioned by and premiered at Studio Theatre and is set in an unnamed East Coast city that evokes both DC and Philadelphia. It follows a civil engineer who grew up in “the Projects” and has returned to redevelop her old neighborhood, fixing up a house that her family never would have been able to afford. In this play, Ijames examines the complex nature of gentrification, particularly at the hands of people who came from that area. Given the rise of this specific form of “home-grown gentrification” as personal mobility clashes with communal responsibility, Good Bones sets the stage for an uncomfortable, important conversation.
Ijames deliberately sets his work in locations that fuel the narrative rather than merely serve as setting. White (2015) tackles issues of artistic ownership, white privilege, the appropriation of Black womanhood, and exploitation. All of this is smartly explored in an art gallery, providing a much-needed spotlight into the ways in which art—a format heralded as the epitome of mental freedom and self-expression—is one of the biggest offenders in terms of racism and a continual perpetrator of Black exploitation. Pulitzer- Prize-winner Fat Ham (2021) is set at a backyard cookout, a cornerstone of Black American life and a site of transformation, community, grief, and jubilee. Fat Ham premiered during the pandemic in a digital production with the Wilma Theatre and went on to a production at the Public Theater in New York, which transferred to Broadway. Studio’s 2023 production was one of fourteen professional productions of Fat Ham that season, making it the second most-produced play in the US that year.
Ijames took over as the head of the Columbia University’s MFA playwriting program in 2025, following his work as an Associate Professor of Theatre at Villanova University and co-artistic director of the Wilma Theater. His work has appeared at the Public Theater, The Arden Theatre Company, The National Black Theater, Baltimore Center Stage and Interact Theatre Company, The Philadelphia Theatre Company, Orbiter 3, Ally Theatre Company, Flashpoint Theater Company, and Theatre Horizon, to name a few. His work has also been commissioned by Studio Theatre, Bryn Mawr College, and Manhattan Theatre Club. On the awards front, Ijames has taken home the 2014 Barrymore Award for Outstanding Direction of the play The Brothers Size. His play White was awarded the 2015 Terrence McNally New Play Award for New Play and The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington received an honorable mention for the 2018 Kesselring Prize for playwriting. Fat Ham took home the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a Lamda Literary Award for Drama, and received a 2023 Tony Award nomination for Best Play.
Wilderness Generation (2026), Ijames’s latest play, premiered in the spring at Philadelphia Theatre Company and is receiving a developmental second production at Studio in November 2026. Ijames and his director Taibi Magar are returning to the script with a new cast to integrate some of what they learned about the piece in their first production. A comedy with emotional heft, the script owes as much to The Cherry Orchard and A Raisin in the Sun as it does to the sitcoms of the 1990s and early 2000s that the cousins in the play grew up watching.. In some ways it is a departure for Ijames—it’s a naturalistic work (no ghosts, no re-imagined Martha Washington)—but in many ways, he says, it is grounded in the story that brought him to work in theater in the first place, one of community. “Repair is possible. You can fix what is broken. We have been convinced that we must do life alone, that we are alone, and that’s just not true,” insists Ijames. “You are not isolated. There is someone who wishes you well; there is someone who's glad you're alive. That's the thing I want all my work to remind people: You are not alone. And I think that's powerful."
—Cleopatra Mavhunga and Adrien-Alice Hansel